"When you are a child," Lemony Snicket says, "nothing is your business.”
“You are constantly being yanked one place or another with no satisfying explanation provided by the adults doing the yanking, and so you soon get used to being in a constant state of bewilderment"
As we grow older, we think:
Adults will stop yanking us, we'll start doing the yanking, and we'll understand everything.
We'll stop being bewildered.
That’d be nice.
The reality we’re faced with is the opposite.
The path becomes less clear, choices and relationships, more ambiguous.
After some time and experience in navigating this more complicated world, we become or at least try to be functioning, independent, and contributing members of society.
What does it mean to be free?
That's a big question.
More often than not though, the situation is not that of a mother bird coaxing her chicks to fly...
...more like an uncle throwing us into the deep end and telling us to swim.
While we may be surrounded by systems of support (parents, friends) and other systems that hold us in place (institutional racism, sexism, etc), we are largely left on our own to make decisions.
And each one has consequences.
French thinker and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that:
"We are left alone and without excuse.
That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does"
It is in this freedom that we are forced to make choices whether we like it or not.
These choices and the actions we carry out define us.
We are incapable of not making a choice because, annoyingly enough, refusing to choose is a choice in itself.
So what do we do?
We hearken back to the days of the safety net.
Back to the yanking (this time we want to be yanked).
We try to go to others for help, gurus, mentors, parents, friends, anyone.
We ask for advice, suggestions, guidance on what to do.
Yet even there we are still making choices by asking for advice.
The Problem with Advice
Sartre notes that:
If you consult a priest, for instance, it's you who has chosen to consult him, and you already know in your heart, more or less, what advice he is likely to give. In other words, to choose one's adviser is only another way to commit oneself.
It is false then, to say that we are going to these people for advice. Rather, we are looking for someone to affirm our previous notions.
Psychologist Sheldon Kopp calls this “an obstacle to growth”.
In his colorfully titled book "If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!", Kopp notes that the typical result of this type of relationship, between the advice seeker and the advisor, is one that is not unlike the psychologist-patient relationship.
He writes:
Though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the psychologist to make him feel better.
What makes it even more complicated is that it is unlikely the advisor will ever know exactly what you are going through.
If we are the sum total of all our actions, decisions, genetics, upbringing, etc.
If we are products of our nature and our nurture, the odds that another human being would be able to tell us exactly what to do is ludicrous.
So should we trust their advice?
Kopp addresses all of these points by saying:
There is nothing to be taught, yet there is something to be learned.
There is something we may come to understand, but not if we demand that it be explained to us.
There is something that may happen to us, but not if we await its coming from outside of ourselves
So this is not to say that we cannot accept advice, only that we know basically what kind of advice we are going to get and that in the end, we must act true to ourselves, not to what someone else's vision of us is.
As John Kaag puts it in his book Hiking with Nietzsche:
As it turns out, to ‘become who you are’ is not about finding a ‘who’ you have always been looking for.
It is not about separating ‘you’ off from everything else. And it is not about existing as you truly ‘are’ for all time.
The self does not lie passively in wait for us to discover it.
Selfhood is made in the active, ongoing process, in the German verb werden, 'to become'.
And the only way to that self is all we are:
Actions and choices.